I you want to make a call directory extension for iOS, for identifying or blocking certain phone numbers, you need a way to reload the extension every time you want to add or remove from the list of phone numbers you are blocking.

To reload the extension, you can either get your users to open their phone’s settings and disable the extension and re-enable it or you can reload it programmatically from your app.

To reload the extension manually, follow this procedure:

Open the iPhone’s settings

Go to “Phone”

Go to “Identify phone numbers”

Switch your extension off, then on again

To reload the extension programmatically from your app, use this code:

A call directory extension is used to block or identify phone numbers on an iPhone, phone numbers the user don’t have in their contact list.

TL;DR: Because iOS app extensions have very limited resources, it is difficult to load many thousand phone numbers into the call directory without the extension crashing. This is my attempt to get around this issue.

2016-02-10 Update: This post is about how to get around a bug in Visual Studio Code. This bug is now fixed, and my automatic text replacement (described in this blog post), works just as well in Visual Studio Code as in other applications.

In programming, and probably in most other lines of work where you work with text on a computer, there are some symbols and special characters that you use a lot, but that are quite difficult to type. Perhaps you need to hit a combination of keys to produce the symbol, or even more time-consuming, you might need to open a menu or tool to insert the symbol.

VSCode, being extremely lightweight (at least compared to Visual Studio), does not come with its own web server. This can be a bit confusing for those of us used to just hitting F5 in Visual Studio and getting our website launch in a browser.

When using VSCode, you have to rely on the power of Node.js instead.

This is a tutorial of how to start a really small project, containing only a single HTML file in VSCode and edit it with live preview in a browser.

This is a super short introduction to start writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code. This tutorial is written for Windows users, but it should be roughly the same procedure for Linux and OS X users, since all these tools are cross platform.

(And handle revision numbers larger than 65534)

When using a system for continuous integration to automatically deploy your application, it is important to know what version of your code is deployed. This tutorial will show you how to automatically set the version number of the deployed .dll.

In a .NET project, the version number is defined in AssemblyInfo.cs, on the format 1.0.0.0. The numbers are MajorVersion.MinorVersion.Build.Revision. The two latter, build and revision numbers, should be set automatically by your CI system on each deploy.

Content of this tutorial

How to create an MSBuild target to automatically insert the revision number on build

What to do when your revision numbers are too large to use as .NET revision numbers

How to use Bamboo to get the latest revision number from Subversion and use this as an input parameter to MSBuild